Video: Watch a Sneak Peek of New Musical by THE BAND'S VISIT Creators, DEAD OUTLAW

If you want to do a side show, you're class of 10 and 1. You've got to have the money to make the suckers come

It gets a man to thinking, lump inside his throat, and that goes in the wallet I keep inside my coat

There's something about a mummy that people want to see. Oh, there's something about a mummy that looks a lot like me

Hello, I'm Richard Ridge for Broadway World. Dead Outlaw is Audible Theatre's first commissioned musical by the Tony Award winning creative team of The Band's Visit with Eric Della Pena

It'll begin performances at Audible's Minetta Lane on February 28th, and we dropped by the Bowery Electric to bring you a sneak peek and to meet the company

There's something about a mummy that really stirs the soul. I'm pretty excited, and I don't like being excited. But I'm enjoying being excited

I'm reasonably excited. I will get more and more excited as time goes on until I probably have some kind of a heart attack. I hope it's not fatal

If it is, I'm happy this was the last show I wrote with, of course, my friend Eric Della Pena

Excited is funny, because you ask how excited, and I go, well, I'm not excited. I'm nervous. I'm tense. I'm nervous. I'm terrified. I feel inadequate

And that's, I guess, my version of excited. I guess that's what excited means

So you want to rise to it. I want to rise to the quality of the writing and to the big ask of the high skill level of execution of the story

What unlocked it for you as the book writer? Weirdly, two things. One is, because Elmer becomes this mummy that gets into show business, the idea of showmanship and spectacle is built into the story

So you're sort of like, okay, that could be a musical. I see why. And then I was also fascinated by the challenge, the story challenge of telling a story where your main character dies halfway through

Because I hadn't really seen that done, and I wasn't sure how to do it. And that kind of challenge always really hooks me

What a creative team you are working with. What has that been like

It's honestly, I don't use this term lightly, a master class every single day

Like, in a rehearsal room, sometimes you go off into your own world and try to focus on your lines

And I just find myself watching these men work as frequently as possible, because they are just the top of their field and the best at what they do

And they work with a lot of humility. It's not a space of like, all right, here's what you're going to do

It's kind of like, well, what do we do? So that's a really nice way to work

The level of musical theater expertise in the room is kind of nuts

Crazy. Crazy. And it makes you want to be at the top of your game when you come to rehearsal

I've been in a lot of workshops for musicals. And when you feel supported in this way and that you're in such good hands, it's such a gift

It's such a gift because everybody's rowing in the same direction. And you just want to help it keep going, keep going, keep going

This is a two-pronged thing, which is that there is a show. We are doing a show. No, no

We are doing a full and beautifully realized musical, albeit a very unusual one, at the Minetta Lane, which previews on February 28th and opens on March 10th

And also with the audio geniuses at Audible and the audio geniuses of David Yazbek, Dean Chernow, Eric Dillapennia

are making a really full realization of the pieces, an audio piece of the whole thing, which will eventually be recorded and released down the line

I can recollect all the tales. A picnic in the rain, a walk we may have taken, but I could be mistaken

I don't remember. A stranger, a stranger, never gave a reason why he came here on his own

A stranger. Typically what Audible does with these shows is they just record the show in the theater a few nights, and then you pick the best performance and they put that out

They have been kind enough because Yazbek and I and Eric have this history in the recording studio, and I have a recording studio

They're basically letting us build like a radio play out of this, which is something that Yazbek has worked on in the past

I've done some of that stuff in the past, but it's so thrilling to make this with Soundscape and music and voice acting

It's something that we haven't really done before with one of Yazbek's shows, and I don't think Audible has had it before, so it's quite original

Well, this means that this thing is going to have a beautiful theatrical life

They produce beautifully. I just went last night to the Minetta Lane and saw what they're doing

It's gorgeous stuff, and it's also going to have a life after that as an audio offering

That's kind of really thrilling. It helps off-Broadway, and it's the future of theater in some ways, another aspect of what theater can be

It's really cool because we're kind of simultaneously doing two things. The live experience is really not to be missed, but the live experience also has to feed into the Audible experience

It's a new thing, and we're all kind of finding out what this means, and it's really exciting

Really good theater isn't something that happens just because of what we do, and it's not something that the audience just experiences on their own

It's something that happens in the air, in the middle, and that's a perfect metaphor for what happens with Audible

You present something, the audience hears it, but what they actually experience and what we actually experience happens in the middle

It's this intangible, wonderful thing. It's that third thing that we all strive for in the world of creativity, and here Audible is allowing us to do that

I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here